Tableau looks to help clients mash-up data with new cloud-based Tableau Online

Fresh off its initial public offering, Seattle-based Tableau Software today is unveiling a new cloud-based product called Tableau Online which allows users to easily share business data with customers, employees and partners. The company already offers downloadable business analytics tools, such as Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server.

With the addition of the new product, Ellie Fields, senior director of product marketing at Tableau, said it will be easier for organizations to share data and ask detailed questions of it.

“With Tableau Online, what we are doing is taking Tableau Server, and putting it in the cloud,” Fileds told GeekWire. “This is going to just make it that much faster and that much easier for anyone to get started with Tableau.”

The company is launching the product with 200 customers, including Elite Brands and Herring Creek Capital. It costs $500 per person per year, with Fields saying they wanted to keep pricing very simple. Each account comes with 100 GB of storage.

Tableau went public at $31 per share in May, and it is now trading around $56. It has a market value of $3.3 billion.

Tableau has offered a cloud-based product, dubbed Tableau Public, for the past three years. But Fields said that the free offering is primarily used by journalists to put public data on the Web.

With Tableau Online, the company is looking to build on the success of the previous cloud-based offering, but gearing the product to organizations and businesses. That means Tableau Online includes the ability to place permissions on workbooks and data sources, making sure that the business intelligence does not leak outside of the organization.

Fields said that some organizations, such as Herring Creek Capital, are using the product to track investment data and fund performance information. Elite Brands, meanwhile, is using the tool to track and create reports around sales data.

“It is difficult to get analytics out of the enterprise, and outside the firewall. Most business intelligence systems sit inside the firewall, and sales people will tell you that they hate getting on a VPN on their iPad. They won’t do it,” said Fields.

Salesforce.com already offers some visual analytics products, but Fields said that they are focused on other opportunities. Tableau Online sucks in data from Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift, allowing customers to mash up data and blend it. That’s different than what’s available from Salesforce.com.

“If you see a down trend, it is hard to go and look into the root cause, and really explore that data and drill down. You are stuck with the reports you’ve got,” said Fields. With Tableau Online, Fields said you can blend sales data with cost data or research data, asking more detailed questions of the data.

John Cook is GeekWire's co-founder and publisher, a veteran reporter and the longest-serving journalist on the Pacific Northwest tech beat. Follow him @johnhcook and email john@geekwire.com.